Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
The Second Sunday of Christmas, 4 January 2026

Jeremiah 31:7-14
John 1:1-18

While the Christian year begins with the First Sunday of Advent, today is the first Sunday in the year of our Lord 2026, and from the Scriptures we receive both comfort and inspiration. We have spent a great deal of time with the Prophet Jeremiah recently, and most of that time we listened to Jeremiah complain. As I said last year, Jeremiah complains so much that he gave rise to an English word, jeremiad, which means ‘a long, mournful complaint or lamentation; a list of woes’. Poor Jeremiah had reason for his jeremiads: first, the sins of the people of Judah, who continued their wicked ways despite his warnings; then the Babylonian defeat of Judah; and finally the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple and the exile of the leaders of the community, including Jeremiah himself. The Book of Jeremiah, as we have it in the Bible, ends with that exile, with King Jehoiachin of Judah still in Babylon but being treated kindly by King Evil-merodach, who releases him from prison. (Jeremiah 52:31-14)

Today’s reading from the Book of Jeremiah is profoundly un-Jeremiah-like. ‘Then shall the young women rejoice in the dance, and the young men and the old shall be merry,’ is not the prophet’s usual jeremiad. What we are listening to today is part of the short ‘Book of Consolation’ (Jeremiah 30-31) in which the Lord offers the people of Judah hope amid war and exile. When Jeremiah was first called the Lord told him that his role would be ‘to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant’. (Jeremiah 1:10) Today we see Jeremiah building and planting. The Book of Consolation disrupts the prophecies and descriptions of disaster that make up the rest of Jeremiah’s Book, reminding those who first heard it and us who read it today that, since the last word belongs to God, that last word can never be darkness or destruction or death.

According to Jeremiah, the Babylonian Exile was a punishment for a people who ‘have become great and rich, they have grown fat and sleek. They know no limits in deeds of wickedness; they do not judge with justice the cause of the orphan, to make it prosper, and they do not defend the rights of the needy.’ (Jeremiah 5:28) The hope that the Book of Consolation offers is of a new society of justice. Those normally judged least important, those ordinarily seen as least suited for leadership, will be at the centre: ‘the blind and the lame, those with child and those in labour together’ will be led home ‘in a straight path where they shall not stumble’. The Lord had punished the people because ‘from the least to the greatest of them, everyone is greedy for unjust gain; and from prophet to priest, everyone deals falsely.’ (Jeremiah 6:13) But in God’s promised future, ‘I will give the priests their fill of fatness, and my people shall be satisfied with my bounty, says the Lord’. The people will no longer seek unjust gain, instead they ‘shall be radiant over the goodness of the Lord, over the grain, the wine, and the oil, and over the young of the flock and the herd; their life shall become like a watered garden, and they shall never languish again.’ All that was wrong will be made right and everyone, women and men, old and young, will rejoice.

When will this new society of justice and joy appear? It did not come with the return from Babylon of the people of Judah. Even when some of the descendants of the Babylonian exiles settled in Judah, their land was still governed by a foreign empire, Persian now, rather than Babylonian. What had been the independent Kingdom of Judah was now a small and unimportant province. Judah was never to be independent again; it was to be passed from empire to empire for millennia. The hope that the Book of Consolation offers is not the hope of a new kingdom; it is the hope of a new relationship with God.

The Book of Consolation concludes with the promise of a new covenant, a gift from God like the first covenant, but a gift that goes wonderfully beyond that first one: ‘this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people’. (Jeremiah 31:33) The people will no longer need intermediaries; no longer will Moses have to go up the mountain to speak with God for the people, nor will there need to be priests and teachers to interpret God’s words. Instead ‘they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord’. (Jeremiah 31:34) How will this knowledge of God come about? Some five hundred years later the Evangelist John explains: ‘No one has ever seen God. It is the only Son, himself God, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.’ Through the Prophet Jeremiah God had promised to write the law on people’s hearts; John tells us how this has been made possible: ‘The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.’

On this first Sunday of the year, we hear the Prologue to the Gospel according to John as an overture to the entire gospel, setting its emotional tone and beginning themes that will be fully developed later. Mark’s version of the gospel began with the proclamation of John the baptiser; the gospels according to Matthew and Luke begin with the nativity stories we just heard at Christmas, but the Gospel according to John takes us back to the moment of Creation, when God spoke the Word and all things came into being. John tells us that the Word of God, present at the beginning of all things, has now taken on human flesh and lived among human beings. This breathtaking claim is a profoundly high Christology – Jesus of Nazareth is the pre-existing Word! – but what it means for us is simply that in the words and actions of Jesus we see the Creator of the entire cosmos. Jesus, the one who came that we might have life and have it in abundance, reveals to us that the One who creates made us for abundant life. (John 10:10) In the Gospel according to John this is referred to seventeen times as ‘eternal life,’ which does not mean life after death. It means life before death, life in relationship with the Father here and now.

As comforting and inspiring as Jeremiah’s Book of Consolation was, the hope it offered was exclusive. It was Jacob, the remnant of Israel, firstborn Ephraim, who was to be redeemed. The nations were to hear the word of the Lord and declare that God has redeemed God’s people, but the nations themselves were not to be redeemed. In the prophecies of Jeremiah, a distinction was to be made between those born to the remnant of Israel and those born to the rest of the world. This distinction is destroyed by the gospel. As John’s prologue tells us, no longer are the people of God born of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man. No longer are the children of God of a particular ethnicity, born as members of a particular nation. Instead, everyone who receives the Word, regardless of nationality or ethnicity, has the power to become the children of God. This is the good news that has allowed Christianity to spread throughout the world; this is why we are hearing these words thousands of years after they were first written and on the other side of the world. People do not become followers of Jesus by birth but by baptism. Each of us, regardless of our race or ethnicity or nationality, is a child of God.

Here in Australia we are not persecuted for our faith. Many of our Christian siblings do not share our luck: in other nations, churches are bombed, Christians are murdered, and ethno-religious nationalists declare that only those of a particular faith have the status of citizens. Yet Christians know that, regardless of any external situation, we have the greatest of all possible identities – we are the children of God. Nothing that any external authority does, not even the actions of the world’s most powerful militaries, can deny Christians the true light which enlightens everyone. This is why Christianity survives even the worst persecution; if anything, Christianity thrives under persecution and struggles in safe societies like our own. Our faith does not tell us that if only we follow Jesus, everything will go well with us. After all, the pre-existing Word himself came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But our faith does tell us that nothing can separate us from the love of God that the only Son has revealed to us. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it.

This is what we can hold on to through the coming year. I hope that the world in 2026 will be more peaceful than in 2025. I hope that there is more love and acceptance and less anger and hatred in Australia, but there are no guarantees. 2026 may be a year of greater conflict, greater violence and hate. But if that is the case, we have the assurance of knowing that we have been given the gift of life, eternal life, life in abundance, and that life is the light of all people. In 2026, let us walk in God’s light. Amen.